Dinner in the Garden

We've found a new spot to have dinner outside.  It's a little cooler there and we can pretend we're in our vineyard.

Peaches and Pears and Figs, Oh My!

Status Report - July 23, 2018

Things have really been happening in the garden.  I've harvested the garlic and two of the potato plants.  We're now getting Stupice and Lizzano cherry tomatoes, green beans, zucchini, bell peppers, aubergines, carrots, chard, and kale.  The lettuce was very good (starts from Minto Island Growers) but have now bolted.  I've just planted the third sowing of green beans

and the last two rows of carrots.

 I also planted some cranberry beans.

 The leeks are ready but I haven't pulled any yet.

I started two Kale-ette plants from seed.  I moved them to the potato bed and put them under a shade cover because it's been in the 90s.

The herb bed has been a great success.  I'll do it again next year.

The rhubarb and squash bed is doing well.

The trough planter is really filling in.

 The new bed is filling in gradually.

 And the rose bed has been spectacular.

And last but not least we just picked all the pears on the Ubileen.  It was a bumper crop!

Status Report - June 1, 2018

I've been pretty busy and have really neglected my blog.  Here are some photos from the first of June.

There were hundreds of blossoms on the mandarin.

 The new trough planter.

The new bed along the back fence

Kale and chard.

 Carrots and garlic.

Leeks, peppers, and aubergines.

 And here's the front yard.

Spring, Again

We returned from Tucson on Friday, March 23.  The weeds were out of control.  We had a couple of decent days, so we both turned to and pulled the most critical ones, the bittercress that was blooming and days away from dispersing thousands of seeds.  Since then, we've slowly worked on the remaining weeds, so by now it looks pretty good.

We're eating carrots that were planted last fall, which are huge but still very good.  Also, we've had some leftover chard.  There are a few leeks left, but they are pretty big.  I haven't tried one yet. 

I moved the rhubarb to a bed in back, the better to care for it.  I sowed several kinds of carrots, chard, kale, a lettuce mix and snap peas.  And I planted a single row of potatoes, both yellow and red ones.

Last weekend Carolyn and Ken came for lunch.  After lunch, even though the weather was cold, windy and occasionally rainy, she and I went out in the yard and she showed me how to dig and divide dahlias.  Yesterday I spent all day working on them, and now they are all divided and replanted in the bed among the fruit trees and near the back of the garage.  It was a big project, but I'm glad I did it.  With any luck I won't have to do it again.  I'll plant something small along the path where the dahlias were.

I cleaned out the strawberry bed and they look good.  The peach and pear trees are blooming.  With all this rain, I'm afraid the bees won't be out to pollinate them.  So I went out with a brush and hand pollinate some of the lower flowers. 

The lilies that I had ordered arrived yesterday, so I've planted them among the new roses.  Whew!
Fortunately for me, the week ahead looks like rain every day.  Time to catch my breath.

Fall Cleanup

Because we are leaving on a cruise on October 17, I decided we need to start fall cleanup early.  We ordered an extra green waste bin for a couple of weeks and have been filling them both to capacity.  By now, though, things are pretty much done.  All that is left of the vegetable garden is carrots, leeks, and chard. 

We have new neighbors next door.  The house has been empty for two and a half years, and I had forgotten how open the view into their back yard was.  So we put up more reed fencing and added two more Black Tower elderberries.  They have a bit of catching up to do to next to the older ones.  But they do seem to grow fairly fast. 

A New Bed!

We've been thinking about the future of our back yard and have come to the conclusion that at some point we will want to either remove or scale back the raised vegetable beds.  We would probably replace them with a lawn (gasp!).  So with that in mind, we took a look at the back fence and decided it needed some spiffying up.

We removed the three compost bins and donated them to the local school garden program.  Then we dug up the remaining cotoneaster stump plus some miscellaneous plants and lots of bulbs.  We added some compost and fertilizer and then planted new plants.  There are two trees (Styrax obassia and Franklinia), a crape myrtle, another Black Tower elderberry, a climbing hydrangea, and a jasmine.  We also dug up and moved a physocarpus that was languishing in the shade.

It all looks pretty puny right now, but it should be filling in before too long.  I plan to add a few more lower shrubs and maybe another hops next spring.

The next project was to plant three new roses in the bed where melons and squash had been.  I'll plant more lilies in the spring.

And finally I planted a manzanita and a grevillea along the south-facing wall of the house, where it gets blistering heat in the summer. 

All this was accomplished over three days.  We've had almost no rain this summer, so things are bone dry.  But rain was on the way, so we got it all done.